Los Angeles County plans to reassign or hire more than 50 social workers and investigators as part of an ambitious effort to root out fraud among those who care for disabled or frail seniors.

The rapidly growing In-Home Supportive Services program has come under intense scrutiny in the past year due to lax oversight by the California Department of Health Care Services.

As part of the budget deliberations this summer, state lawmakers – at the urging of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger – decided that local authorities would be better equipped to find and punish those who are defrauding the system.

Counties are required to submit plans to combat IHSS abuse by Tuesday, and are expected to take over policing duties by the end of the year.

“We already have social workers who go to homes to determine eligibility,” said Philip Browning, director of the County Department of Public Social Services, which oversees the IHSS program. “But if we found something that we thought was suspicious, or out-and-out fraud, we couldn’t do anything except refer it to the state.”

The county’s budget for this anti-fraud effort is $9.5 million, with the bulk of funding coming from the state and federal government. Under a plan approved recently by the county Board of Supervisors, Browning’s department will hire or reassign 27 new social workers to verify claims for services that are suspicious, and review all submissions for claims on a quarterly basis.

The county will also create a task force to promote interagency cooperation between the District Attorney’s Office and other county programs such as welfare, food stamps and Section 8 housing. The task force will consist of nine new investigators within the county Department of Public Social Services, and seven new positions in the District Attorney’s Office.

Most of the staff will be reassigned due to the uncertainty of funding when the state takes up the budget again this June, said John Allen, head deputy of the district attorney’s Welfare Fraud Division.

Browning’s department will also hire more staff to establish databases for tracking abuse and will work more closely with the county registrar-

recorder to check whether seniors enrolled in the program have died.

The measures come on the heels of a scathing 2007-08 civil grand jury report, which looked specifically at IHSS fraud in Los Angeles County. The jury found that one of the most common sources of abuse stems from workers filing for pay long after the senior has died.

“The IHSS program is not supposed to be a cottage industry for scam artists, especially those embedded within the ranks of DPSS itself,” according to the report, which cited more than 700 cases of fraud.

Allen guessed that “millions and millions” of taxpayer dollars fall into hands of those who abuse the program every year.

“I can’t tell you what that number is – we’ll know more in June – but I just know in my bones from working with welfare fraud that there is a lot of waste,” he said.

Last year, county officials initiated a statewide discussion about the effectiveness of California’s monitoring efforts, which in part led to the change in state law.

The changes were also made in hopes of saving the state potentially billions of dollars in fraudulent payouts to workers, who earn $9 to $14 an hour to provide nonmedical care, such as chores and transportation.

The number of IHSS workers in the county has nearly doubled in the past decade, and the program is expected to continue to grow as the population ages. There are now 185,000 providers in the county, about two-thirds of whom are family members of the seniors.

The aim of the program is to save the state money in nursing home costs and to keep seniors in their own homes as long as possible.

Browning said the county is well-equipped to handle the added duties. His department, which employs some 800 social workers, also investigates fraud in the California Work Opportunities and Responsibilities to Kids program, and the Food Stamp program.

“This will, I believe, give us a better handle on how much fraud there actually is in the program,” he said. “We will consider this a top priority.”

Melissa Evans is the city editor of the Long Beach Press-Telegram. Prior to joining the Long Beach paper in 2011, she was a reporter covering health care, religion, city government and social issues for newspapers in the Los Angeles area, the Bay Area and the East Coast. She has a master's degree in theology from Loyola Marymount University, a bachelor's degree in journalism from San Diego State, and has completed several fellowships in journalism. She has lived in the Long Beach area since 2007.

Join the Conversation

We invite you to use our commenting platform to engage in insightful conversations about issues in our community. Although we do not pre-screen comments, we reserve the right at all times to remove any information or materials that are unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable to us, and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy the law, regulation, or government request. We might permanently block any user who abuses these conditions.

If you see comments that you find offensive, please use the “Flag as Inappropriate” feature by hovering over the right side of the post, and pulling down on the arrow that appears. Or, contact our editors by emailing moderator@scng.com.